Iranian regime had always the intention to expand

June 29, 2018

On Friday, June 29, 2018 a symposium held in
Roissy-en-France organized by the Foundation for Studies on the Middle East (FEMO) on
the prospect for change in Iran.

On this occasion, during four different discussion panels,
numerous speakers (researchers, diplomats, editorialists and military) shared
their analyses on the current political and social situation as well as on the
future of the Iranian regime and the nature of future diplomatic and commercial
relations with Iran.

The second panel titled : Iranian revolutionary guard corps (IRGC) and Interference in the Region

Mr. Walid Phares an expert on terrorism and Middle East affairs was the moderator. After he introduced evey one on this panel, he added:

Before we start the
panel I'd like to say a couple things about my little experience that's going
to help me field the questions or actually ask the panelists to address those issues.
I am now in the United States but I was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. My
first contact with Iranian studies was as old as 1987 when I published a book
in Arabic on the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran1987, many people were not
born when that book was published-in which I projected that eventually because
of the ideology, ideology as a genesis by itself, the Iranian opposition knew
that before all of us, but we started to realize that the Iranian regime
because of its initial ideology to which it would add geopolitics and economics
and ambitions, originally will tend to expand in the region. It was in the DNA. And the book
was not read in the West because it's in Arabic, but it's available at the
Library of Congress.

After I emigrated to
the United States, my first academic article was published in the Journal of Global
Affairs in Washington, D.C., and I titled the Iranian-Syrian axis, 1991 in
which I projected after the collapse of the soviet Union that now more than
ever, then that would be 28 years ago, the Iranian regime is going to try to
expand. It did so already in the '80s via the same organization we are going to
be commenting about, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard-let's call it the Pasdaran-into
Syria, and from Syria, into Lebanon via Hezbollah. But one remark I made at the
end of the article that was a decade before the Iran war that Iran and the
Syrian regime have a plan for Iraq. No matter what, at one point in time in
history they want to link geopolitically and create that bridge, the land
bridge that everybody now is talking about.

Walid Phares

Finally, third point
in the history of my research, it was after the American invasion of Iraq, the
fall of Saddam Hussein, and attempts by the United States to help the Iraqis
recreate a more democratic Iraq. The way the Iranian regime behaved in Iraq
from day one all the way to the day we withdrew from Iraq, it was aimed at controlling Iraq, under
the American management since the departure of the American forces. It was very
logical from day one. So along this whole region the Iranian regime always had ambition to become
regional. And in the center of
which you have the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Last but not least, as of 2010,
as we start hearing about incidents out of Sana'a in the north of Yemen, while
the American media, the international media, didn't even know where Sana'a was,
we realized that this is an Iranian regime project which eventually years later
hooked up with the Houthis and the rest is history as you know it. so this panels is going to be addressing from
different angles extraordinary experiences, the expansion of the Pasdaran in
the regional as the central force for the Iranian regime in trying to create
the much wider sphere of influence. And I can tell you, but that's not our
panel, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has projects around the world, as
United States Congress hearings and our agencies' analysis have established,
all the way to Africa, all the way to Latin America, and East Asia as well.